The Avenger 1 - Justice, Inc. (17 page)

“O.K.,” said a voice by the light. “Just wanted to check and be sure it was you— Hey! Who’s that on the foredeck?”

Smitty moved as if he were a hundred-pound stripling instead of weighing nearly three hundred. He writhed sideways, and had his vast bulk over the low rail so fast that it seemed a mere sliding shadow.

As he dropped to the water, his face was bleak with fury and defeat. To have come this far—actually to the core of the mystery itself—and be discovered! He sank, meaning to swim underwater and away from the boat. But the water was less than five feet deep. At that depth the searchlight could penetrate the water and impale him like a fly on a pin. He charged for the rear of the boat to get behind it. A boat hook shot down and caught him by the belt. It stopped his rush through the clogging water. He whirled, gave one vicious yank on the pole, and saw a form fall headfirst into the water. He started on.

Another boat hook shot down toward him. But this did not reach to catch him. It spanged against the side of his head like an iron-tipped lance. And that was all Smitty knew for a while.

Voices, heard dimly and seemingly from a far distance, came finally to Smitty’s ears. He heard them as though in a dream as he slowly came to his senses.

“We ought to have killed the big gorilla.”

“Orders,” another said. “Farr wants to have a talk with the guy before we put the skids to him. Who is he, anyhow? And how did he get here, at this time of night, at the same time as the old guy they dropped from the plane?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of funny,” a third voice agreed.

“Kind of funny! Is that all you can call it? Here this guy drops in on us. And there’s no boat around, no other plane but the transport’s been over, and we’re too far from anywhere to swim. How’d he get here? It’s the answer to questions like those that Farr wants before we snuff him out. Besides, Farr wants to know if any more guys are around.”

“Maybe the big fella won’t talk.”

“He’ll talk.” The voice was very grim. “You ain’t seen what Farr can do when he really wants answers!”

There was silence. Smitty realized that he was bobbing up and down—being carried. And he had heard three panting voices. It took three men to drag his vast bulk.

He heard hollow steps as he was carried onto a wooden porch, then the bang of a door. He fought to get his strength back, but couldn’t. The sock on the head had been too severe.

He was carried down steps, and there was a clammy, underground feel to the air.

“I don’t like all this,” one of his bearers said uneasily. “I ain’t yellow. You both know that. But I don’t like the smell of this wholesale snatching. All these folks, big shots and a couple bump-offs thrown in, and maybe more to come—I don’t like it!”

“Don’t be a sap!” panted one of the others. “Know what we split on this? A million fish! Roll that under your tongue. One million dollars, twelve ways! And no telling what the guys higher up will take. This is
big.
Worth takin’ a few chances for.”

Smitty heard another door open and stirred feebly.

“Hurry it up!” snapped one of the men. “The guy’s waking up. And I don’t want to be around when he does—if he’s still loose!”

Smitty was dumped to a cold concrete floor. He heard a woman’s suppressed scream, and the sound of more men’s voices. He opened his eyes. Pain from the lump on his head blurred everything. He shut his eyes again.

Cold metal clamped on wrists and ankles. Then one of the men laughed, and he heard three sets of footfalls as they went away, and the slam of a door.

But still after these three had gone, he heard the frightened babble of men’s voices.

Smitty had come very close to concussion of the brain with that vicious jab of the boat hook. Over half an hour more passed before he had even a shadow of his normal strength. Then, when he could open his eyes without having the light hit them like sharp knives, he looked around.

He was in the large basement of what seemed a standard, though old, house. There was a rusted furnace in the center. The light was subdued, because the only illumination was a single small electric bulb, near the furnace. The light showed two small basement windows, heavily barred.

There were five people in the basement besides himself—four men and a woman.

Of the four men he recognized his former employer, lying white and still on the floor. Over him bent a burly man with graying hair and iron-gray sideburns whom Smitty faintly recognized after a while as an acquaintance of his ex-boss, Lawrence Hickock, nicknamed Old Ironsides.

The other two men, though Smitty did not know them by sight, were Stephen Vincent and Harry Andrews.

Hickock shook his leonine head.

“They’re animals—not men!” he growled. “Leon is apt to die, without attention. But they don’t care—if they get his signature first. The murderers!”

At a little distance, the woman coughed and shivered as she stared, white-faced, at the still-unconscious Leon.

“And there’s Mrs. Martineau;” said Hickock savagely. “Apt to get pneumonia from being held in this cold, damp cellar. But do these men care? No. They’ve got what they want from her. Let her die.”

Vincent spoke up, lips a thin, firm line in his harried face.

“That’s why I’m refusing to sign,” he snapped. “I will not allow brutes like them to get away with it!”

Hickock stared at him moodily.

“There’s a time for heroics,” he said, “but this isn’t one of them. They’ve got us. Might as well face that fact. I’d rather lose some money—a lot of money—than my life. And I think you would, too, when you think it over a little more logically.”

“No man with a spark of courage—”

“Oh, don’t be a fool!” snapped Hickock. Evidently the imprisonment here had worn nerves and tempers raw. “Look at Mrs. Martineau. A few days more in this hole may kill her. Look at the rest of us. At the mercy of these yapping dogs. If just one refuses what they want, we may all die. Can’t you understand that? It took me about two hours to get over my noble courage. Then I signed. If you have sense, you’ll do it, too.”

Vincent chewed at his lips. “Maybe you’re right.”

Smitty had found that he was lying right against a wall. He tried to get up now, and heard chains jangle and felt himself jerked to one side.

He was chained to the stone wall of the basement. The men were taking no chances with his great size and strength. Iron bands were around wrists and ankles, with lengths of chain the size of the cross links on tire chains going from the bands to iron loops sunk in the stonework.

The woman and Hickock and Andrews and Vincent stared at the sound of the chain links.

“Who are you?” said Andrews. “Do you own stock in Tap & Die, too?”

Smitty shook his head—and wished that he hadn’t. The pain was still enough to be sickening.

“Are you out to rescue us, then? Are there others near?” said Hickock eagerly.

“I came alone,” said Smitty.

Hickock sighed. And the four relapsed into apathy. On the floor, Leon stirred a little and moaned.

Smitty looked around more carefully, in the hope that he would see a woman with tawny-gold hair and soft-brown eyes, and a little girl. But if his chief’s wife and child were here, at least they were not in this part of the house.

Smitty began rubbing his manacled wrists, behind him, against the rough cement wall. Rubbing, rubbing, with the others not even bothering to look. Mrs. Martineau, forty and frail-looking, coughed with a premonition of deathly illness soon to come if medical attendance weren’t provided quickly.

The slow night passed. Daylight swelled through the heavily barred basement windows. Smitty rubbed his chains against the wall behind him.

The ten o’clock sun, which could only with difficulty get into two heavily barred basement windows, was brilliant on the glittering surface of Lake Ontario.

In the seeming center of the brilliance, floated a fast motor cruiser, engine cut off and idling.

Far in the distance on every hand, vague smudges showed on the horizon. Islands of varying sizes in this honeycomb of submerged hilltops. Straight ahead was the nearest island—perhaps four miles off.

In the cabin of the cruiser, standing with his face to the bow, Benson waited for developments, pale eyes flaming, steely muscles tense.

Murdock, sitting behind him in the cockpit, with gun trained through the broad opening of the cabin hatchway on his back, had said he was to be dropped overside in a thousand feet of water. Very well. But if he were just dropped, he would float. Benson didn’t think Murdock would want a floating body around, apt to be discovered.

It was dollars to doughnuts that the man meant to weight him down, somehow, before dropping him over the side. To do that, Benson thought, he’d have to come close. And if he came close—Benson was going to get him, gun or no gun.

Benson, though Murdock didn’t even dream it, was on that boat of his own volition. Murdock’s attention had been drawn to him on the dock when Benson’s foot slipped.

But Benson’s foot had slipped on purpose. The gray jaguar of a man was too sure-footed ever to have made that noise by accident. He had wanted to be “captured” in the hope that Murdock would take him to the hideout of the gang.

Well, he’d been captured. But he wasn’t going to the hideout. He was going to a watery death, unless he could overpower Murdock when the man drew near to tie a weight to him.

But with the boat drifting and ready, Murdock said: “Keep on standing right where you are, dummy. I’d just as soon put a slug in you as not!”

Then Murdock moved around. Benson heard him. And in the clear glass of the cabin windows before him, the gray man could catch a faint reflection of action behind him.

Murdock was taking a smaller, spare anchor from the side locker whose lid made one of the cockpit seats. From the same locker he drew a coil of half-inch rope.

“Like fish?” Murdock taunted. “They’ll be your buddies in a minute—for a long time.”

Benson, experimentally, turned a little. Like light the man had dropped the rope and had his gun in his right hand. Benson stooped over a little. If he could get Mike out of his right leg holster, or Ike out of the left—

“Straighten up!” snapped Murdock, jabbing the gun forward. “I’m taking no chances with you.”

Benson straightened. He knew Murdock would prefer not to shoot, because sound carries so far and so clearly over water. But he knew the man
would
shoot, if he felt it necessary. He could always say later he’d shot at a floating bottle or what not.

Benson would have to abide by his first idea—get Murdock when he drew near to fasten the weight to him.

But that plan didn’t pan out, either. Murdock was an old hand. He made a loop of the end of the rope, and came to the hatchway.

From a distance of six or seven feet, far too great for Benson to get at him swiftly, he tossed the loop with his right hand, holding the gun ready in his left.

The loop settled over Benson’s body. Murdock yanked it taut. The loop held Benson’s arm at his sides. Only then, chuckling evilly, did Murdock come close, gun lax.

“Going to jump me, huh?” he said. “Well, bigger men than you have tried to—”

His voice broke in a wild scream. Benson’s arms were held to his sides, but he could move his hands—and he had!

Steel fingers gripped over Murdock’s legs just above the knees. Like iron claws they bit and twisted, and the punishment of it was testified by Murdock’s hoarse yells.

Murdock came out of his fog of agony enough to remember that he had a gun. He leaned back away from Benson to get clear and use it.

Benson had been waiting for the move. He shoved backward, hard. The shove, plus the backward leaning, sent Murdock flying backward to fall in a heap in the center of the little cabin. His head banged the deck.

Foggily he raised his gun. But Benson, arms swelling loose from the slip-noose, was on him before he could shoot. He got the gun with one powerful swoop. Murdock cried out again as he stared into pale and deadly eyes flaming from a white, still face that in the midst of turmoil showed no emotion whatever.

Then Benson swung the gun.

There was silence, broken by a thump from the cockpit. Benson leveled the gun. The thump had come from the locker across from the one in which Murdock had found rope and spare anchor.

“Come out of there, or I’ll shoot!”

The lid opened. A red, raw face showed, at each side of which was an outstanding red ear, like a sail. Frosty blue eyes stared into Benson’s deadly gray ones.

“MacMurdie!”

“I’d have got the skurlie with a boat hook, if you hadn’t nabbed him,” MacMurdie said calmly enough.

“Mac! How—”

“I saw the man come in this boat, from behind the crates. I saw him go into the general store, and twigged he was Murdock. So I changed our plans, I hid in the locker, thinkin’ the boat would bear me to where we want to go, and that later I could get back and lead ye to it. But it seems ye came along, too.”

Already circumstances had proved what a rare man this red-faced, bony-fisted Scot with the enormous feet was. This capped it.

Benson’s hand touched the bony shoulder for an instant.

“Thanks,” he said. Then, voice expressionless again as his dead, white face: “But the plan has misfired. We didn’t find where the hideout is—”

“I’m thinkin’ we did,” MacMurdie interrupted. He went back to the locker in which he’d hidden, bent down, and came up with a dirty, water-stained piece of paper.

“It seems more than one mon runs this boat. So for the convenience of those who might not know the lake around here to the last detail, some laddie among the gang we’re after drew a neat little chart. And here it is. I found it when I jumped into that fish-smelling coffin.”

Benson spread it out. Rough pencil lines showed an island with a curiously shaped tree on a high point. The tree was low on one side and high on the other. It resembled a gigantic setting hen.

In a line from the east to the tree, the shore was indicated as a straight low cliff. And in the cliff was a black circle, arching from the water.